This application relates to gardening tools such as bulbers. In particular, this application relates to hand-held bulbers of the type used to dig holes in, for example, a flower or vegetable garden. The application relates most specifically to a hand-held bulber having a dirt release mechanism.
A bulber of the common form includes a handle, usually made of wood, steel, or hard plastic, either with or without a cushioned covering material, attached to a metal cylindrical body having a distal edge. The distal edge is typically crenellated or serrated to assist “cutting” into hard ground surfaces. With sufficient downward pressure and moderate back-and-forth rotational movement of the handle, the formed edge facilitates digging. Once a sufficient depth is reached, the digging motion is reversed to extract a core of dirt within the cylindrical body. Before a subsequent hole can be dug the dirt core must be removed from the bulber.
One option is to remove the dirt by hand, attempting to push the packed earth out either end of the cylindrical body. This is an undesirable solution because people working with or without gloves may not want to dirty the gloves or their hands. Also, the steel edges of the bulber may be sharp enough to cause injury if impacted by a bare hand. Another solution has been to provide an expandable cylindrical body at the distal end. While this has been accomplished in several ways, the common element seems to be to use a two-piece handle where one piece telescopes into the other and can be compressed together to thereby force out the distal end of the bulber. Initially, this compression may be done by the fingers of one hand. However, due to the structural rigidity required of the cylindrical body, repeatedly compressing the handle may require considerably more strength than is capable by a single hand of the user.
The present invention is unique in that it addresses each of these, as well as other problems found in the prior art. By providing a bulber which is suitably rigid along the metal body to support digging, but which also provides a suitable mechanism to repeatedly and reliably release dirt from the body, the present invention solves these problems.